InfluenceWatch Podcast

Episode 151: This Business Will Get Out of Control

January 7th, 2021  |  15 mins 11 secs

conservative, culture, democrat, demonstration, evil, florida, joe biden, left, liberal, libertarian, mob, politics, president, progressive, protest, republican, right, riot, speech, united states, violence

In this episode: We’re doing something different this week, because we're recording this on Thursday January 7, 2021. Yesterday, a riotous mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and attempted to prevent the certification of the votes of the Electoral College that make Democrat Joe Biden President-elect of the United States. There is no excuse for demonstrators, whatever their beliefs and goals, to overrun police barricades and attempt to prevent the people’s elected representatives from carrying out their duties. Violence is not speech—and storming the Capitol is violence. At Capital Research Center, we do have a specific point of view: We believe in free markets, Constitutional government, and individual liberty—violent disruption of the legislature is not that.

Episode 118: 1619 Project’s Fake History

May 8th, 2020  |  14 mins 8 secs

1619 project, commentary, conservative, history, left, liberal, libertarian, new york times, nikole hannah-jones, politics, progressive, pulitzer prize, right, slavery, united states

Last week, the Pulitzer Prizes announced that the prize for Commentary was awarded to Nicole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times’s highly controversial and factually suspect “1619 Project,” a nominally historical exercise to re-center the origins of the United States on the first importation of enslaved Africans to Virginia. Today, I’m joined by my Capital Research Center colleague Ken Braun, who wrote the Influence Watch profile on the 1619 Project to discuss the project itself, the criticisms of prominent—in some cases, Pulitzer-Prize-winning—historians of the Project, and the goals of the Project’s institutional supporters.

Episode 110: What the Green New Deal Would Mean

February 24th, 2020  |  10 mins 5 secs

alexandria ocasio-cortez, aoc, environment, green, mitch mcconnell, new york, saikat chakrabarti, seiu, senate, service employees international union, texas public policy foundation, u.s. economy, union, united states

Last year, the hard-left—pressure groups like the Sunrise Movement, politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union—presented the “Green New Deal,” a package of radical environmentalist policy demands that ranged (according to an “FAQ” document that the Green New Dealers denounced and memory-holed shortly after its release) from banning air travel to retrofitting every building in the United States. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell denounced it as a “radical, top-down, socialist makeover of the entire U.S. economy”; Saikat Chakrabarti, one of Rep. Ocasio Cortez’s close allies and a former aide, admitted the Green New Deal was “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy” plan.

But what would the plan actually mean for consumers and families? Today, I’m joined by Jason Isaac, Senior Manager for the “Life: Powered” project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) to dig into that question and other issues related to energy both in Texas and nationally.